Many fighter blogs aren’t that interesting. They’re usually ghostwritten, contain no real insights, and seem half-hearted at best. That said, if you haven’t been reading Jay Hieron‘s blog on the Xtreme Couture wordpress site, you have been missing out. The Life & Times of Jay Hieron just hit its fourth installment, and there are some interesting moments. The best part is that you always learn something, but you never know what it will be.

For example, did you know that Randy Couture has a condo in Beverly Hills that he sometimes lets fighters live in when he isn’t using it? Turns out it’s “a sick place”. I’ll bet you also didn’t know that Mike Pyle has notoriously bad gas, or that Jay Hieron has a felony record which has prevented him from getting jobs that aren’t fighting people, or that Xtreme Couture began in the UFC’s “Ultimate Fighter” gym, which Randy Couture and Forrest Griffin had keys to and which the UFC doesn’t use for anything when they aren’t filming.

These things you learn without ever wanting to.

Of course there’s the usual stuff about who he trained with and when, which is generally not too exciting, except for when Gray Maynard first shows up on the scene.

When we weren’t with Bas we were back in Vegas. Gray Maynard came in around that point. I had first met Gray at Cobra Kai, Marc Laimon’s gym, a while back. When a good grappler or wrestler would come to the gym Marc would clear the mat and put him in there with another guy and let the whole class watch. Gray came in and was talking with Laimon and Marc was like, “clear the mat”. I didn’t know who Gray was and he didn’t know who I was. We were just grinding, going at it hard. We were both going for takedowns but nobody could get one. We were really going at it. I knew right away, “this guy is real good”. It went 15 minutes and nobody got a takedown. Afterwards we shook hands. Gray told me who he was and I told him who I was, and that I was a Junior College National Champion. He was Division I for all four years so he didn’t have any respect for me. He told me that. I told him that he better respect me because most of the good Junior College guys are as good or better than the D-1 guys, but it’s the grades that screwed them up. We traded numbers after that and said we’d stay in touch.

Huh. So Gray Maynard is the kind of guy who will tell you to your face that he doesn’t respect you since you didn’t advance beyond junior college, and he’ll say this to you the first time you meet. Kind of makes you wonder how that scenario ended with the two of them trading phone numbers. It’s not often that “I don’t respect you or what you’ve done with your life” is followed by “Hey, can I get your number?”